


The Gardener, the Beauty, and the Beast

by RunSquidling



Category: Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, alternate take on a classic, although this is KIND OF based on the disney version, since the original fairy tale is well into the public domain, technically this counts as original fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 19:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunSquidling/pseuds/RunSquidling
Summary: The young gardener doesn't understand why her beautiful, sweet, kind mistress is married to such a... beast.





	The Gardener, the Beauty, and the Beast

She was a sweet, kind, gentle woman. She had a soft, round, rosy face with early-blooming laugh lines, and she liked to sit in her window seat with a cup of tea and a book for hours at a time, laughing and crying and sighing to herself. On sunny days, her fluffy curls made a copper halo around her face.

I worked in the household as an assistant gardener, and I watched her silhouette in the window every day as I tended the roses. She was an angel. Perfect and pure. I also watched her husband come home every night with blood on his arms and beard, and wash himself in the fountain before he went to her. I didn't understand why such a gentle woman was married to that monster. That beast. 

So one day, after her husband had left for the afternoon, after I had washed dirt from my hands and face and changed into my Sunday calico, I went to her in her window to beg my answer. I stood by her feet until she noticed me. She reached the end of her chapter, put her finger between the rustling pages, and lowered the book to her knee.

"What is it, little gardener?" she asked.

"Mistress," I began, hesitant, knowing I was being impertinent, that this was far outside my place, but she was such a kind, gentle woman, and her hair was glowing like a halo, and I couldn't imagine her throwing me out over a question. And so I continued. "Mistress, your husband returns each night with blood on his arms and in his beard, and he washes in the garden fountain by moonlight before he goes up to you, and it frightens me, mistress, it frightens me terribly that someone so sweet and kind as yourself must be married to this..." I faltered; there was a gleam in her eye like she was offended, like I had overstepped, but also like a laugh.

"Beast?" she finished for me. I nodded, jerkily, and my fingers tangled in my skirts. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be asking this. I should leave, but I was held by her piercing gaze, by the sound of her fingers rustling the pages of her book as she thought. 

"Go home, little gardener," she said, her piercing brown eyes looking right through me. "Go home and give it some thought, and come back to me in three days when the sun is rising. Why would a sweet, kind woman like me have married a beast?" 

She was mocking me. But the question, and the invitation, I wanted so badly for them to be real that I ignored the possibility that she was simply telling me I was a fool. I couldn't ask for clarification; she had returned to her book, and I was no longer there, not for her. Her face was slack like she was gone from here. She laughed softly to herself. The sun shone through her hair.

I returned to the garden to pluck slugs, and to think. Why, indeed? At first, I thought bitterly, his great strength is somehow attractive to her, his charisma overshadowing his monstrousness. But the next afternoon, I saw her reading to him in the garden, stories of war, and I saw her kiss him goodbye and stroke his great hand, and--no, she knows of his monstrousness.

Then I considered, she is cowed by him, she is afraid. She is trapped and cannot escape, and perhaps masks her fear even from herself.

But the next afternoon, she walked out on their tea, leaving him howling at her to come back, and before she left she yelled right back in his face _you don't know the king like I do, you have spent your life in decadence while I lived in filth and how dare you tell me the king is righteous when you know nothing of how he treats his most vulnerable subjects?_ And their fight was loud, and angry, but never did those great hands rise against her, nor curses nor degradation nor even that sly beast condescension seep past his lips. And afterwards, as she rode her black horse out the front gates, he watched her, grumbling, and did not send anyone after her. 

She was gone until the next afternoon. He worried and fretted all about the grounds, and sent nobody after her. I was wrong. She was not afraid of him. 

On the third night, baffled and out of ideas, I reluctantly snuck up to her room to tell her I had failed, I was not clever enough. I went up just before sunrise, and paced outside the door, rehearsing.

_Mistress, I'm sorry, I keep getting it wrong..._

_Mistress, you have to tell me, I am so confused and I can think of nothing else..._

_Mistress, was this all a trick? What am I missing? Was I even supposed to come here?_

Then the beast's heavy footsteps echoed down the hall, and, panicking, I hid in a nearby linen closet, and listened to him walk past. She might have no fear of him, but I had seen him covered in gore, and I could not forget. 

"Wife!" he called, knocking on her door, his deep voice thunderous. "I have returned from my wanderings and seek your company!"

The bedroom door slid open on oiled hinges. "Where have you gone tonight, husband?"

"I have gone to a child crying on a stoop, heard the cries from inside the house, and removed the nightmare from her kitchen. I have gone to a church and taken a false priest from their house, and returned his stolen tithes. I have gone to a doctor with high reputation and low ethics and prevented him from taking liberties with any more patients."

"Tell me the tales," she said, inviting him in. The door clicked shut. I came out from the linen closet, and stood for a time. I thought. And then, as the sun rose, she came for me. 

"Do you have your answer, little gardener?"

"But those people--if what I heard is... he is not a judge, what gives him the right..." I stammered. I could see her face darkening the more I spoke, and so I remembered my place and was silent.

"When I was a young woman," she said, staring me down. "Maybe twenty, I was forced into marriage with a despicable man. People say it was not force, but unfortunate circumstance, that made me agree to a marriage a did not want. Those people do not understand what force means."

I almost interrupted her, to ask for more answers, but her stormy eyes bored into me and I did not. 

"Nobody believed that I did not want this marriage. The whole village loved him. Any woman would have been honored to be asked to be his wife, but I saw in him only a violent, selfish pig of a man who would never let me be anything but his little wife. I could feel myself shrinking even just being near him. My father understood, he knew I could never be happy, but my father was sick, and we were barely getting by, and when the rumors began and my father's tinkering business started to collapse..." She sighed, her face haunted. I had never noticed before that she was my height. She had always seemed so tall. 

"I knew who started the rumors. Who spread them. But I pretended I didn't, I lied to myself, because I had no choice. Nobody else would have me. Nobody wanted to stand in his way. I could have been an old maid, happily. But I couldn't see my father shrivel.

"The wedding day was the worst day of my life. He kept telling me to smile, but I couldn't. The night was no better. It was surrender. Giving up. It was everything I could have been, everything I could have done, drowning.

"Immediately, my father's business turned around. I convinced him I was happy. I convinced me I was happy. My husband didn't much care whether or not I was happy, as long as I rubbed his muddy feet and smiled

"He came home one day after a long hunting trip with a rack of pheasants over his shoulders. I had been feeling at peace, reading by the window, enjoying our empty little house. Then the smell of him wafted through the door, the stench of unwashed man and rotting soil and death, and the idea of touching him one more time, while he told me to smile, I couldn't do it, I would rather die than live through that another day.

"And I did not want to die.

"I went to the kitchen, and returned as he was resting his booted feet on the dining table. He thought the knife was for the birds.

"Afterwards, I ran, of course, and when I was so exhausted I couldn't run another step I found this place--and him." She smiled softly. "I was hysterical. I could barely speak, but I was desperate to wash the crust of blood from my arms, and begged for a bath, which he afforded me. And when I came out, wrapped in a silk robe and Turkish cotton towels, he had dinner laid out for me, and all he said before he left me alone was, _You have slain a beast this night_." She was still smiling softly into the distance, but her attention soon drifted back to me. "Do you still question my marriage?"

"No, mistress," I said, looking at my own clasped hands, shaken. I should not know so much about my mistress. I should have assumed she had her reasons, and let be. Shame crept up through my shoulders. I had thought of her has so pure, so perfect, that I forgot she was a woman. That she had her own secrets. Secrets I should not know. I didn't know how to hold this information. I didn't have space for it.

I felt uneasy about the killing. It seemed justified, but killing was never justified. Who were they to decide who deserves to die and who deserves a second chance? Couldn't she have run away, without killing the man? It was wrong. All of it was wrong. But I didn't know what to do about any of it.

"The next person who questions it?" she said, turning away from me and reaching for her bedroom door, "Tell them everything."

"Yes, mistress."

The door shut in my face. I turned slowly, walked down the corridors until I found a way out, and returned to the large garden shed. I still felt overwhelmed, overfull. I took up my shears and my bucket of fertilizer and walked to the rose garden. Whenever I don’t know what to do, I take care of the roses. 

I pruned. My thoughts started to settle. I would tell everyone, just like she asked. And let justice take care of itself.


End file.
